New Energy News (February 2001)

Scientific Paper
Title	New Energy News (February 2001)
Read in full	Link to paper
Author(s)	Patrick G Bailey
Keywords	New Energy, Cold Fusion, Zero Point Energy, climate change, patent policy
Published	2001
Journal	New Energy News
Volume	8
Number	2
No. of pages	25

Read the full paper here

Overview

This is the February 2001 issue of New Energy News (Volume 8, Number 2, ISSN 1075-0045), the monthly newsletter of the Institute for New Energy, edited by Patrick G Bailey with material contributed by Hal Fox, Thomas Valone, Toby Grotz and others. It is a news bulletin rather than a research paper, organised into standing sections — Abstracts, Book Review, Articles, Letters and Meetings — and it announces the switch to distribution in both plain ASCII and PDF, with an Adobe Acrobat CD-ROM offered by post for $2 to readers without Internet access.

The issue is unusual in the New Energy News run for how much of it is given over to mainstream climate science. Roughly half the pages reprint the Shanghai draft Summary for Policymakers of the IPCC Third Assessment Report, together with BBC, Washington Post, New Scientist and Munich Re coverage of it. The remainder carries the newsletter's characteristic content: energy statistics, a critique of U.S. energy policy, a Hal Fox editorial on patent-office treatment of paradigm-shifting inventions, a cold-fusion patent defeat, and a call for papers for a Space Physics conference in India. The editorial through-line — stated most directly in Fox's piece — is that the institutions that certify what counts as a workable invention are structurally hostile to discoveries that fall outside the accepted model, and that this, rather than any failure of the evidence, is why new-energy technologies remain uncommercialised.

Contents of the issue

Abstracts

Bailey passes on a note about Xogen Power Inc., a private company holding U.S. patent 6,126,794 for a device said to split water into hydrogen and oxygen using pulsed waveforms of varying shape, efficiently enough to "run motor driving generator that recharges battery". The item is presented as a lead to be checked, with the observation that the publicly traded Tathacus Resources, which owned 20 percent, was selling at about $6.75 a share on 24 January 2001 against a five-month high of $14.25 and a low of $3.80 Canadian.

Hal Fox forwards two items from the DOE EREN Network News of 7 February 2001. The first notes that California, then in the middle of its electricity crisis, actually ranked high in energy efficiency: the average residential user consumed about 37 percent less electricity per month than the typical U.S. consumer, and although Californians paid the third-highest rate in 1999, their monthly bills were 17 percent below the national average. The second reports Munich Re's projection that the worldwide cost of climate change would reach $300 billion annually by 2050, from tropical cyclones, land lost to sea-level rise, and damage to fisheries, agriculture and water supplies.

The DOE and the Comprehensive National Energy Strategy

Thomas Valone contributes a summary of Integrity Research Institute's 176-page report Energy Crisis: The Failure of the Comprehensive National Energy Strategy, which concluded that only 35 percent of the 1998 DOE strategy had any chance of fulfilment. The strategy was judged most successful where DOE had direct authority — transportation efficiency, federal buildings — and empty where it consisted of "vague intentions" such as "cooperate with foreign governments" and "maintain a viable nuclear option". The report's key findings as listed are: that the strategy does not say where the energy is to come from to meet a U.S. demand exceeding production by 40 quads by 2020; that it does not address the expected 2010 peak of world oil production and subsequent decline; that it accepts carbon emissions rising through 2010 to 44 percent above 1990 levels, or 51 percent above the Kyoto Protocol; and that it fails to note the cost-effective benefits of emission reductions even though a 1997 five-laboratory DOE report (ORNL/CON-444) showed paybacks meeting or exceeding investment in three of four sectors.

Reactions to a paradigm shift

The issue's most substantive original piece is a short editorial by Hal Fox. He opens with the claim that T. Henry Moray's patent application for a solid-state amplifying device around 1930 was returned with the comment "This will obviously not work because it has no filament" — the examiner's frame of reference being the heated vacuum tube. He then states that when the cold fusion patents of Pons and Fleischmann and, later, more than 200 others were rejected, applicants were sent a copy of a paper by sixteen MIT PhDs and a New York Times article as evidence that the effect does not exist. His diagnosis is general: "The currently-accepted and taught model of physical reality that is in the text books and taught in the Universities and colleges is the current belief structure (religion) for the academic community. Therefore, that which is contrary to the current model is going to receive the treatment given to all paradigm shifts."

He then lists topics on which patent applications were being prepared or expected: methods and devices to nullify or shield the effects of gravity; propulsion for a "flying saucer" superior to ordinary aircraft; greatly improved proton accelerators; communication devices transmitting information at many times the speed of light; devices to communicate with departed personalities; and devices for tapping the energy of the vacuum continuum, on which he notes a first patent had already issued (5,018,180).

His proposal is legislative. An inventor should be entitled by law to a hearing before the patent examiner and the examiner's classification supervisor, at which scientific authorities could be marshalled to establish a scientific fact — defined by Fox as "the close agreement of a series of observations of the same phenomena by independent investigators" — and once such a fact is established by qualified scientists, the Patent Office should be barred from denying an application on grounds of the supposed impossibility of the discovery.

Energy statistics

Two short items from Gordon B. Moody's Global Energy Outlook give total U.S. energy consumption by primary source for 1998 — petroleum 40.7 percent, natural gas 24.1, coal 23.3, nuclear 7.9, hydroelectric 3.8, other 0.2 — and the EIA projection that Americans would consume 127 quads in 2020, a 32 percent increase, with carbon dioxide emissions up by 116 million tons of carbon equivalent, absent changes in federal law.

Climate change coverage

The bulk of the Articles section reprints the January 2001 Shanghai draft of the IPCC Working Group I Summary for Policymakers, prepared by 123 coordinating lead and lead authors, 516 contributing authors, 21 review editors and 300 expert reviewers. The reproduced text includes the twentieth-century global-average surface temperature increase of 0.6 ± 0.2 °C; the finding that atmospheric CO₂ has risen 31 percent since 1750 to a concentration not exceeded in 420,000 years and probably 20 million; the ~1.5 ppm per year rate of increase; roughly three-quarters of anthropogenic CO₂ over the past twenty years from fossil fuel burning and most of the rest from deforestation; a satellite-era discrepancy in which the lowest 8 km of atmosphere warmed at +0.05 ± 0.10 °C per decade while the surface warmed at +0.15 ± 0.05 °C per decade; roughly 10 percent decreases in snow cover since the late 1960s and in Northern Hemisphere spring and summer sea-ice extent since the 1950s; sea-level rise of 0.1 to 0.2 m over the century; and the explicit list of things that have not changed — no significant trend in Antarctic sea-ice extent since 1978, no significant twentieth-century trend in tropical or extra-tropical storm intensity and frequency, no systematic change in tornado, thunder-day or hail frequency in the limited areas analysed. The IPCC's calibrated confidence vocabulary ("virtually certain", "very likely", and so on, with their percentage ranges) is reproduced in full.

Supporting items follow: a BBC report by Alex Kirby with Robert Watson's projected 1.4–5.8 °C range and 0.09–0.88 m sea-level rise to 2100; a New Scientist piece by Peter Hadfield on Yoon Jong-Hwan's finding that the winter convection current in the Sea of Japan, which reached below 2,500 m when first measured in the 1930s, now reaches only a few hundred metres, with oxygen at 2,500 m falling at a rate that would reach zero within 350 years; a Washington Post report from Beijing which notably also carries Fred Singer's dissent that the report is "a political statement" not conforming to thermometer, satellite and balloon data, answered by David Easterling of the National Climate Data Center; a Department of Defense release on a Brussels conference on military organisations and ozone and climate protection; Munich Re's count of 850 natural disasters in 2000 with $30 billion in material damage but only 10,000 deaths against 75,000 in 1999; and a London Evening Standard summary of the second IPCC volume on European impacts.

Book review, letters and meetings

Remy Chevalier reviews a new Tesla-derived title from New Society Publishers, noting the publisher's shift from environmental commentary and comparing the book to Jeane Manning's The Coming Energy Revolution. A notice for David La Chapelle's Navigating the Tides of Change is reprinted. Under Letters, Scott Chubb forwards Bob Park's What's New item reporting that Mitchell Swartz's cold-fusion patent, denied for lack of "operability", had been upheld against him on appeal and that the Supreme Court was unlikely to review it — "After twelve years, cold fusion still has trouble being taken seriously." The Meetings section carries a polymer seminar notice and a detailed call for papers for the Conference on Space Physics, 9–11 November 2001 at Karwar, Karnataka, hosted by Paramahamsa Tewari and the Scientific and Spiritual Research Council, which defines Space Physics as "the mathematics, physics and experimental evidence that demonstrates that matter is formed from the essence of space itself", cites the Casimir effect as evidence that "the apparent emptiness of space is an illusion", and asserts that zero point energy "has been shown to be the root cause of inertia and gravitation". Named participants include Tewari, Shiuji Inomata, Bruce dePalma, Stefan Marinov and Harold Aspden.

Assessment

The issue is a good primary source on how the new-energy community positioned itself relative to mainstream science in early 2001, and the positioning is more interesting than a caricature would predict. The newsletter reprints the IPCC summary at length and without editorial hedging, including the passages that cut against alarm — the unchanged Antarctic sea ice, the absent storm-frequency trend, the surface-versus-troposphere warming discrepancy — and it also prints Fred Singer's objection. A publication supposedly indifferent to institutional science here devotes most of its pages to relaying institutional science accurately. The reason is strategic: the IPCC case supplies the urgency that the newsletter's own agenda requires, and the Valone digest makes that connection explicit by faulting DOE for having no answer to a 40-quad shortfall.

Fox's editorial is the piece with real argumentative content, and it is uneven. Its core proposal — that an inventor be entitled to a hearing at which independently replicated observations can be established as fact, and that the Patent Office then be barred from refusing on grounds of theoretical impossibility — is a coherent procedural suggestion, and his definition of a scientific fact as "the close agreement of a series of observations of the same phenomena by independent investigators" is a defensible operational one. The difficulty is that the essay then supplies its own counter-example. The list of forthcoming patent topics runs from the arguable (vacuum-energy extraction, on which a patent had indeed issued) through the speculative (superluminal communication) to "devices to communicate with departed personalities", which no replication criterion of the kind Fox has just proposed could support. Placing them in one list undercuts the procedural argument, because it invites exactly the response that the Patent Office gave Swartz — that operability, not novelty, is the sticking point.

The Moray anecdote is also asserted rather than documented: the newsletter gives no application number or date, and the claim that Moray filed "the first transistor" patent around 1930 is a strong one that the piece does not support. The allegation that cold-fusion applicants were sent a New York Times clipping as grounds for rejection is likewise offered without a file reference. These are the recurring weaknesses of the format — items are forwarded, not verified — and they sit awkwardly beside the careful transcription of the IPCC text a few pages later. Fox's own closing note on cold fusion elsewhere in the run is more measured than the editorial here; on the evidence of the Swartz letter printed in this same issue, the community's practical situation in 2001 was that the courts, not just the examiners, had settled the operability question against them.

See also

• Patrick G Bailey
• Hal Fox
• New Energy News
• New Energy News (December 2001)
• Journal of New Energy
• Cold Fusion
• Zero Point Energy
• Space Energy
• Paramahamsa Tewari
• Harold Aspden
• Stefan Marinov
• Toby Grotz